Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac was born on May 20, 1799, in Tours, a provincial city on the Loire, the son of Bernard-Francois Balzac, a civil administrator who had risen from peasant origins, and Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, the much younger daughter of a Parisian cloth merchant family ^[1]. The aristocratic particle in his name was his own later addition; the family had no title, and the writer adopted "de Balzac" as an adult, a small act of self-invention that matched the social climbing he would chronicle so precisely in his fiction ^[2].

His childhood was cold by his own account. Sent to a wet nurse as an infant and then, at eight, to the Oratorian college at Vendome, he spent six years as a boarder under a regime that permitted almost no family visits ^[1]. He read compulsively and erratically, and a period of what the school described as a kind of stupor or exhaustion ended his time there in 1813. The family moved to Paris the following year, and Balzac finished his schooling in the capital.

From 1816 to 1819 he studied law, clerking in the offices of an attorney and a notary while attending lectures at the Sorbonne ^[3]. The work gave him an education he later mined constantly: the mechanics of inheritance, bankruptcy, contracts, and litigation run through his novels with a specialist's confidence. When his family proposed a legal career, he refused. In 1819 they grudgingly granted him a small allowance and two years to prove himself as a writer, and he moved into a bare attic room near the Bastille to begin ^[3].

The first attempts failed. A verse tragedy called Cromwell, finished in 1820, was judged worthless by a family adviser, and Balzac turned instead to commercial fiction, producing sensational novels through the 1820s under pseudonyms such as Horace de Saint-Aubin and Lord R'Hoone ^[2]. He later disowned this apprentice work, but it taught him speed, plot construction, and the tastes of the reading public.

He also tried business, with results that shaped the rest of his life. Between 1825 and 1828 he ventured into publishing, then printing, then typefounding, and each enterprise collapsed, leaving him with debts that biographers estimate at tens of thousands of francs and that he never fully escaped ^[1]. The failures were not wasted. Few novelists have ever written about credit, speculation, and ruin with Balzac's inside knowledge, and the pressure of his creditors became the engine that drove his extraordinary output.

Recognition arrived in 1829. Les Chouans, a historical novel about royalist insurgency in Brittany during the Revolution, was the first book he signed with his own name, and La Physiologie du mariage, a witty analytical study of marriage published the same year, made him a fashionable figure in Parisian salons ^[3]. Over the next few years came the novels that fixed his reputation: La Peau de chagrin in 1831, a fable about a magic skin that grants wishes while shrinking with each one, and Eugenie Grandet in 1833, a study of provincial avarice centered on a miser's daughter ^[2].

Balzac's central achievement, and the reason any Honore de Balzac biography returns to the early 1830s, was his realization that his books could form a single connected world. By 1834 he had conceived a comprehensive portrait of French society, and in 1842 he gave the project its permanent name, La Comedie humaine, a deliberate echo of Dante announcing a human rather than divine comedy ^[4]. The 1842 preface set out his ambition to act as the secretary of French society, recording its species the way naturalists like Buffon had classified the animal kingdom ^[4].

The scheme organized his fiction into studies of manners, philosophical studies, and analytical studies, with the studies of manners subdivided into scenes of private, provincial, Parisian, political, military, and country life ^[4]. At his death the cycle contained roughly ninety finished novels and novellas, with dozens more planned, and a cast of more than two thousand named characters ^[1]. His device of recurring characters, in which figures such as the ex-convict Vautrin, the doctor Horace Bianchon, and the ambitious Eugene de Rastignac reappear across many books at different stages of their lives, gave the whole an unprecedented depth. Readers could watch a minor character in one novel become the protagonist of another.

The masterpieces came in a steady stream. Le Pere Goriot (1835) reworked the Lear story in a Parisian boarding house and introduced Rastignac's famous challenge to the city. Illusions perdues, published in parts between 1837 and 1843, followed a provincial poet into the corrupt world of Parisian journalism, and its sequel Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes carried the story into crime and finance. La Cousine Bette (1846) and Le Cousin Pons (1847), written near the end of his life, are often ranked among the darkest and most powerful things he did ^[2]. Among Honore de Balzac achievements, the sheer coherence of this invented world remains the most astonishing: a census of ambition, money, and desire covering France from the Revolution to the July Monarchy.

The legend of Balzac at work is well documented and barely exaggerated. He commonly wrote through the night, rising near midnight, wrapped in a white monk's robe, and working twelve hours or more at a stretch, sustained by enormous quantities of strong black coffee ^[5]. He even wrote a half-serious essay on the pleasures and dangers of stimulants in which coffee figures as both muse and poison. His stated schedule during intense periods, sleeping in the early evening and writing from midnight until well into the following day, appears repeatedly in his letters ^[5].

He revised obsessively at the proof stage, covering printers' galleys with additions and corrections until publishers charged him for the resetting, a cost that ate into earnings he could not spare ^[3]. The pace told on his body. Friends and physicians noted his exhaustion for years before his death, and biographers have connected his early decline to decades of overwork, little sleep, and caffeine.

Balzac the man was expansive, boastful, and endearing to many who knew him. He spent money faster than he earned it, on canes, furniture, and doomed schemes ranging from Sardinian silver mines to pineapple farming outside Paris, and he moved house repeatedly to stay ahead of creditors ^[1]. Contemporaries recorded his conversation as torrential and his confidence as boundless; he reportedly considered himself one of the governing intellects of his age, and posterity has largely agreed with the assessment even while smiling at the vanity.

Women shaped Balzac's life at every stage. His first great attachment, begun in 1822, was to Laure de Berny, a married woman twenty-two years his senior who offered encouragement, money, and practical criticism during his hardest years; he called her La Dilecta and mourned her deeply when she died in 1836 ^[3]. Other liaisons followed, including with the Duchesse d'Abrantes and the Countess Guidoboni-Visconti, and his fiction treats the intelligence and constrained lives of women with a sympathy unusual among his contemporaries.

The defining relationship began with a fan letter. In 1832 he received a letter signed only L'Etrangere, the foreigner, from Ewelina Hanska, a Polish countess married to a much older landowner in the Russian Empire ^[6]. A correspondence began that lasted more than seventeen years and produced hundreds of letters, later published as Lettres a l'Etrangere. The two met in Switzerland in 1833 and maintained the attachment through long separations, brief reunions across Europe, and the death of her husband in 1841.

Marriage came almost too late. After years of delay caused by Russian legal obstacles, her family's objections, and Balzac's finances, the couple finally wed on March 14, 1850, at Berdychiv in what is now Ukraine ^[6]. Balzac was already gravely ill. The journey back to Paris took weeks, and he reached the house he had prepared for her on the rue Fortunee as a dying man.

The 1840s brought consolidation and decline together. The collected Comedie humaine began appearing in 1842 in the Furne edition, and Balzac kept adding to the plan even as his health failed, drafting lists of titles he would never write ^[4]. He stood unsuccessfully for the Academie francaise and dabbled in politics and journalism, but the great constant remained the debt that no success ever cleared.

His heart and circulation deteriorated sharply during his final trips to Ukraine to visit Madame Hanska in 1848 and 1849. By the time of the wedding in March 1850 he could barely climb stairs, and the return to Paris in May left him bedridden ^[1]. He died at his Paris home on August 18, 1850, at the age of fifty-one, months after the marriage he had pursued for nearly two decades ^[1].

The funeral at Pere Lachaise cemetery on August 21 drew a large crowd, and Victor Hugo delivered the graveside oration, declaring that Balzac belonged among the strongest of his century's writers ^[7]. Hugo's speech, printed and widely circulated, marked the moment Balzac passed from popular novelist to national monument.

Balzac's influence on the novel is difficult to overstate. Critics generally place him, with Stendhal and Flaubert, at the origin of French realism, and his method of grounding character in money, class, environment, and physical detail became the working grammar of nineteenth century fiction ^[2]. Emile Zola claimed him as the father of naturalism, Dostoevsky translated Eugenie Grandet into Russian as a young man, and Henry James wrote repeatedly about him as the master from whom novelists had most to learn ^[2]. Oscar Wilde joked that the nineteenth century, as we know it, was largely Balzac's invention.

His afterlife extends well beyond literature. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels admired the novels as an unmatched record of bourgeois society, with Engels remarking that he had learned more from Balzac than from professional historians and economists ^[8]. Auguste Rodin's monumental sculpture of the novelist, commissioned in 1891 and rejected as scandalous when exhibited in 1898, is now counted among the landmarks of modern sculpture, and casts stand in Paris and in major museums abroad ^[7].

The basic Honore de Balzac facts, some ninety novels, more than two thousand characters, a single interlocking world built in about twenty years of mature work, still read like an impossibility. The Maison de Balzac in the Passy district of Paris, the modest house where he wrote parts of the Comedie humaine while hiding from creditors, is preserved as a city museum, and his books remain continuously in print in dozens of languages ^[7]. Few writers have left so complete a portrait of their age or so vivid a legend of the labor that produced it.